Recently consumer's needs have become variety and a tendency to require an entirely new type of food or a food having a new taste and texture is seen. There is also a great need for a bread having a new taste and texture.
Bread is one of the essential food for every day consumption and various kinds of bread are known. For example, bread includes one which is made of lean blending (recipe) and has a tough and a chewy texture (that is, the texture is tough and one should eat such bread by chewing well) (e.g. a loaf of bread), a bread made of rich blending (recipe) having no springiness and short but dry texture (e.g. panettone and brioche) and the like. Thus, most of conventional breads are classified into two types of breads, one with no springiness but with short and dry texture, and the other with a tough and a chewy texture as well as hard resolving (property) in the mouth.
There has not been a bread which has a moderate springiness (that is, sponge-like springiness) along with short texture, easy resolving property in the mouth (which means the bread resolves easily in the mouth), and moist texture. Such taste and texture can not be obtained even by utilizing a mixture of a lean blending and a rich blending.
Generally, an emulsifier or emulsified oil or fat is used for making bakery food short texture. However, addition of sufficient amount of such agent to obtain such effect would provide bakery food with a bad taste and oily and heavy texture.
The inventors of the present invention have proposed a method for providing bread with a soft texture by utilizing a specific processed starch (JP-A-3-87135, JP-A-4-91744, JP-A-5-15296). Another method characterized in addition of pregelatinized starch is also disclosed in JP-A-59-175845. These methods make bread soft, but a dough obtained in these methods are softened and this makes it difficult to process the dough. When decreasing the amount of water in order to solve the problem of softening of dough, this in turn makes it difficult to obtain a bread having a soft texture along with light and short texture.